New Cabinet Office plans show some sign of life in the government’s missions

The Cabinet Office has announced a new pilot programme called the “community mission challenge”, assigning three of the government’s missions to three regional thematic campuses. The growth, opportunity and health missions will have dedicated civil service teams in Darlington, Sheffield and Leeds respectively. 

Georgia Gould, the minister who launched the programme, said that the teams will be working in a new way, getting out into communities with local officials and frontline workers to inform policy and solve local problems, “rather than writing policy papers”. 

The announcement suggests that there may be life left in the missions yet. But somebody needs to tell the Treasury, with the recent spending review not exactly the mission-driven exercise that had been promised. 

Linking the missions to the Places for Growth programme makes sense

It is positive that the government is building on the Places for Growth programme and reiterating its relocation plans, and that ministers want to give civil servants a greater understanding of and opportunity to test solutions to local problems. We have also argued that relocating civil servants works best when they are grouped around a themed campus.

Places for Growth needs to adapt to the post-pandemic context where virtual working may no longer be the norm. Using the missions as the basis for those themes is a good idea and the explicit emphasis on working with local expertise shows that ministers are putting in the effort to ensure that the programme offers something new, with the potential to make a difference. In addition, the ongoing senior buy-in to the programme suggests that the government is keen to make this a success.

The locations chosen also seem sensible. The health mission will be based in Leeds, which has a strong health presence as home to the Health and Social Care Hub, and the Medicines and Healthcare Regulatory Agency has just launched a new digital hub in the city. Darlington hosts an existing economic campus. Sheffield has outposts of the education and work and pensions departments, important for the opportunity mission.

This helps address criticisms, made by the Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee, that new hubs in the Places for Growth programmes had been “haphazard” and needed “clearer rationale” to successfully influence policy making. 

Are themed campuses set up to solve local problems or set national policy?

However, because the sites have been chosen based on the administrative convenience of existing offices, and not whether they are particularly appropriate for interrogating the local problems to which Gould says policy officials need to be exposed, civil servants will have to work harder to seek out the most intractable problems and innovative solutions. It is also not clear whether these new teams will involve re-tasking existing people or hiring new, dedicated, staff. 

The press release announcing the changes spoke of thematic campuses as “testbeds of the government’s missions”, as ways for local communities and frontline workers to “have a greater impact on shaping national policy” but also to “solve some of the key issues facing… local areas”. 

These are all positive goals – and of course civil service teams can do more than one thing at a time – but the government needs to be clear about whether officials in the campuses are primarily there to develop national policy or to solve local problems. The objective needs to be to develop and implement better policy, not to replicate the functions of local authorities or other public services.

Missions will only work if the centre of government properly buys into them

But while this worthy initiative should be welcomed, the divergence between Gould’s outward facing efforts to do government differently and the traditional methods that are the revealed preference of the centre will doom this programme unless they are quickly resolved.

Ministers and senior officials will always follow the money, and the spending review did little to address the underpinning factors that create departmental silos. Budgets do not seem to be meaningfully attached to missions, and the traditional way of assigning spending prevailed. The five missions have also turned into three priorities: growth, health and security.

These recent announcements are a public reiteration of the government’s missions, for a programme with big ambitions for the civil service and the country. But it will mean little, and result in a disjointed missions agenda, if the central architecture of the government remains and unchanged and for as long as the powerful Whitehall centre is not on board.